Mapping of Address and Port (MAP) is a new technology in Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) draft status that may be beneficial to a number of Multiple System Operators (MSOs) or other service providers deploying networks operating according to IPv6. MAP enables the ability to connect IPv4 only client devices in a home network to an IPv6 only MSO network and have the packets routed out to the public IPv4 internet via a Border Relay (BR) device. MAP comes in two flavors: MAP-T and MAP-E. MAP-T is described in IETF draft Mapping of Address and Port using Translation (MAP-T) draft-ietf-softwire-map-t-08 (Dec. 2, 2014), the disclosure of which is hereby incorporated by reference in its entirety herein. MAP-E is described in Mapping of Address and Port with Encapsulation (MAP) draft-ietf-softwire-map-13 (Mar. 9, 2015), the disclosure of which is hereby incorporated by reference in its entirety herein. When supported by a customer edge device, such as an eRouter, the customer edge device itself is capable of translating the IPv4 packet into IPv6 (MAP-T), or encapsulating the IPv4 packet into IPv6 (MAP-E). Effectively, the packet looks like an IPv6 packet when it traverses the eRouter WAN and gets routed on the IPv6 network. The BR device then decapsulates or translates the packet back to IPv4 and routes it to the public IPv4 internet or elsewhere. These two technologies allow MSOs to leverage their IPv6 only networks to allow IPv4 only clients to communicate on their networks.
MAP currently defines Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol version 6 (DHCPv6) as a mechanism for the provisioning of client devices. DHCPv6, as described in described in DHCPv6 Options for configuration of Softwire Address and Port Mapped Clients draft-ietf-softwire-map-dhcp-12 (Mar. 9, 2015), the disclosure of which is hereby incorporated by reference in its entirety herein, requires the client device or other device performing the MAP functions, which may be referred to as a MAP node, to exchange multiple messages with a suitable DHCP server. One non-limiting aspect of the present invention contemplates an alternative mechanism for provisioning MAP to client devices independently of such a DHCP server, such as to enabling provisioning in the absence of DHCP server availability.